Quotes About Justice

if God is all-powerful and God is all-good, then why do terrible things happen to good people?

"We, the people." It is a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787 I was not included in that "We, the people." I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation and court decision, I have finally been included in "We, the people."

receptacle of all virtues. Many excellent qualities flow from the possession of this light: a paternal love toward the subjects; a large heart; a daily increasing trust in God; prayer and devotion. He must see that no injustice is done within his realm.

Everyone in the world is guilty of something.

Vengeance is not the point change is. But the trouble is that in most people's minds the thought of victory and the thought of punishing the enemy coincide.

Our task, of course, is to transmute the anger that is affliction into the anger that is determination to bring about change. I think, in fact, that one could give that as a definition of revolution.

the court, as now constituted, would be meaningless without the jail which gives it its power. But if there is anything I have learned by being in jail, it is that prisons are wrong, simply and unqualifiedly wrong.

Yes, they manage to sound very reasonable to themselves as they talk of deterring others from crime; but the act of putting a man in jail remains essentially the act of trying to wish that man out of existence. From the moment of arrest one begins to feel against one's flesh the operation of this crude attempt at sorcery.

A liberation movement that is nonviolent sets the oppressor free as well as the oppressed.

Someone has to stand up for wimps.

When someone works for less pay than she can live on -- when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently -- than she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made of a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life.

Yes, everything begins in the human heart. But the human heart is not vacuum-packed. The pulsebeat from any breast, however armored, is felt, not just in private contract-"doomed commitments"- between private persons, but in Selma, in Haight-Ashbury, in Vietnam, in South Africa, in East New York. Reports from those locations are also reports from the heart.

Justice does not come from the outside. It comes from inner peace.

Justice for the Hebrews meant . . . making sure that all persons . . . can even worship any gods they choose [Katherine Patterson, "Metaphors to Live By"].

What the people want is very simple - they want an America as good as its promise.

Terms like that, "Humane Society," are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.

God doesn't need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.

In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.

We have fought for social justice. We have fought for economic justice. We have fought for environmental justice. We have fought for criminal justice. Now we must add a new fight - the fight for electoral justice.

A black feminist perspective has no use for ranking oppressions, but instead demonstrates the simultaneity of oppressions as they affect Third World women's lives".

Antifeminists are incapable of making a distinction between being critically opposed to sexual oppression and simply hating men. Women's desire for fairness and safety in our lives does not necessitate hating men. Trying to educate and inform men about how their feet are planted on our necks doesn't translate into hatred either.

Prison does not silence ideas whose time has come.

Medieval justice was scrupulous about holding proper trials and careful not to sentence without proof of guilt, but it achieved proof by confession rather than evidence, and confession was routinely obtained by torture.

John Quincy Adams' dictum that wherever the standard of liberty was unfurled in the world, "there will be America's heart … but she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.